DRAMA: an Introduction
Géza Kállay
A lecture like this one is supposed to start with the definition of the central topic, which is, this time, drama. This requirement follows a specific and wide-spread “scientific” practice, according to which one may not go into the particulars of anything unless one has accurately and comprehensively circumscribed it, i.e., before one may claim to be able to tell what one is really talking about. But we of course use a good many terms correctly and with ease – at least under ordinary, everyday circumstances – without being able to give their exact specification. “To call something this or that” (e.g. a piece of writing “drama”) is also a matter of the context we are in at the moment of our decision; our particular position and the specific ground we wish to occupy with our very locutions (speech) will determine our perspective: we would like to call something ‘drama’ today, under these circumstances, while tomorrow we may call it something else.
So I will look around and imagine – while writing these lines – that I am in the context of the lecture-hall talking and gesticulating, facing approximately a hundred students. In other words, I am taking advantage of a the inherent theatricality of the lecturing situation and declare that while I am asking the question “what is drama?”, you are and I am always already (‘head over heels’) in it. My lecture notes serve as a kind of script for my speaking and behaviour, and you, listening and taking notes (but right now: reading), play the role of the (today also in the theatre passive) audience. The etymological kinship of concept and conceive, however, (both words going back to Latin concipere, ‘to take in’) might also give us the clue with respect to our present position of understanding: we might have to look for the understanding of concepts not only around conception (‘origin’) in general, but around the conception of our own, our very origin and coming into being; it might precisely be “I”, the very individual investigating a concept who, in his origin, serves, in his or her whole self, as the “explanation” and the “source of definition” for the very concept under investigation, These questions point towards another great case-study in the origins of the human being: Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.
Sophocles, one of the greatest Attic playwrights, did not leave us his definition of either drama or tragedy, yet, in Oedipus Rex – a play hailed even by Aristotle (384-322 BC) as one of the best tragedies[1] of the time – he seems to present a lot about the genre. Sophocles the Athenian (?494 – 406, BC) lived through almost the whole of the famous 5th, “classic” century in which his beloved Athens rose to greatness and met its fall: he lived for roughly ninety years (the exact date of his birth is unknown). Sophocles first competed at the Dionysia in 468 and he was immediately awarded first prize. He was never placed as third in the tragic contests and he was astonishingly prolific – ancient accounts put the number of his plays at 123 (of which 7 survive); and, early in his career, he also performed in his own plays, which was a well accepted practice then.[2]
The Dionysia (the first recorded one is from 535 BC) was the annual, principal contest of a cycle of dramatic performances, held in the spring, gathering about 17 000 spectators – practically the whole population of Athens – in an open-air theatre, swelled by a large number of visiting strangers. It was a religious ritual, supervised entirely by the Athenian Government, held on a number of successive days but competition was not felt to be incongruous with the religious dignity of the occasion: before a tragedy could be performed at all, it had to pass the scrutiny of a selection-board (which judged the play chiefly on dramatic merit and very seldom on political grounds) and acceptance itself was already a high honour; The playwrights submitted their pieces to the archon, who was in charge of the festival at which the play was hoped to be performed. It was the archon who “granted a chorus” to the poets selected, which meant that he provided a choregus, a wealthy gentleman, who paid – among other things – the expenses of the chorus. The office of the choregus was regarded as a highly honourable and special service to the official state religion. A competition of comedies was admitted to the Great Dionysians in 486 B. C., and to the Lenaeans in 440 B. C. In performance, the play competed with the work of two other authors, and the prize was awarded by the votes of a panel of adjudicators, influenced, of course, by the reactions of the audience. The work of each author consisted of a group of four plays, three tragedies, either independent of each other (this practice was introduced precisely by Sophocles[3]) or forming a trilogy (the ‘old’ practice of Aeschylus), and a ‘satyr-play’ of a lighter vein (so, three competitors presented four plays in the course of the festival – thus there were usually 12 plays altogether). The reward, even in material value, was substantial. The actors, including the members of the Chorus, were exclusively male and trained by the poet himself, who was also the ‘director’, the ‘stage-manager’ of his plays. The actors were paid by the city but the other expenses (elaborate costumes, masks depicting, with broad and exaggerated emphasis, the dominant characteristics of the actor’s role, high buskin boots and a lavish feast for all the players) were covered by the above-mentioned choregus.
Like other tragic authors, Sophocles composed the music, as well as the words of the choral odes: his music-teacher was Lampros and his model for dramatic style was the ‘old master’, Aeschylus. Sophocles introduced a few very significant innovations, too: the all-important Chorus originally consisted of twelve people, singing-reciting the story (providing a narrative, almost exclusively from the traditional mythology or the heroic past) and there was one actor, a kind of prologue and ‘fore-singer’ first, later more and more in dialogue with the Chorus (the ‘dramatic’ element). A second actor, as an antagonist to the first, was introduced by Aeschylus (turning tragedy into a kind of agón, a contest itself) and a third by Sophocles, who raised the number of the Chorus to fifteen. It was also Sophocles who, according to Aristotle’s Poetics[4], introduced painted stage-scenery as well. The space for performance was the orchestra (a dancing-place) in which the Chorus moved and chanted, there was a platform for the actors (often raised above the orchestra) and a building (frequently with the facade of a palace or temple) as backdrop and as a retiring-place to change costumes, with three doors, the central one reserved for the principal actors. At either side of the orchestra and near the stage there was an entrance-way (parodos). Because the theatre in Athens faced south, with the town and the harbour at the audience’s right and the open country to its left, it became a convention that characters entering from the right were ‘coming from town or sea’, and those entering from the left ‘came from a long distance or by land’ (e.g. messengers, shepherds, etc.). Later on this convention was applied to the side-doors of the building on the stage, too. There were various kinds of stage-machinery, the most important being the mechané (‘machine’, moving “flying gods”) and the eccyclema (a platform on wheels, to reveal interior scenes).[5] For Sophocles, the tragedy of life is not that man is wicked or foolish but that he is imperfect – punishment for shortcomings is not automatic and is often beyond the moral or ethical plain. The ‘tragedy of situation’, in which the hero is lost either way, did not appeal to Sophocles. Oedipus is a wise father of the citizens, courteous and reasonable – the pity is that with all this excellence he must still fall. Sophocles’s greatest achievement is that the various aspects of the hero’s characteristics are so combined with the events that they lead to a disastrous issue (cf. the temperament of both Oedipus and his father, Laius – without that it would hardly make any sense for them to meet at the cross-roads). The disastrous issue, in retrospect (and, because the story is well-known, in advance) should appear to have been inevitable yet before the particular circumstances started to work on the hero (cf. the plague in Thebes) he is in that ‘normal’ state which we conventionally call ‘happy’. He must be passing from this normal situation to a disaster which is either unforeseen or much greater than could be possibly expected, through the working together of character and circumstance. The play is the discovery procedure, the proof-seeking ‘detective-story’ itself, witnessed, step by step, by the audience, in which the various characteristics of the hero and the elements of the plot ‘recognise’ each other: they ‘enter into a dialogue’, interact and get intertwined. (‘Whodunit?’ – it is I.).
Oedipus Rex[6] (429-420 BC) is the ‘drama of dramas’ because, besides being an excellently structured and thrilling tragedy, it also makes its hero re-enact – within his very drama – what the ‘dramatic’ itself might mean. Here Sophocles – as Shakespeare in King Lear or in The Tempest, for example – shows a keen interest in his very ‘medium’ and subject-matter. While putting the sad story of the King of Thebes on display, he wishes to investigate drama with the help of the very drama he is showing. Oedipus’s final gesture of plucking his eyes out, for instance, might be interpreted as the coding of the audience’s essential relation to the stage into the tragedy itself: although our primary bond with the stage is through watching and seeing (the Greek word theatron, [‘theatre’] originally meaning ‘a place of seeing’)[7], the horror of having to look ourselves in the face, and of seeing ourselves as we are while witnessing to the tragedy is so unbearable that the moment we are revealed, our natural and first reaction will – paradoxically – be to cover our eyes, or to look the other way; we will go to all possible lengths to avoid the moment of total exposure. Oedipus will ‘oblige’ us by re-enacting this natural reaction ‘in our stead’, thereby inviting us to, nevertheless, face ourselves and, perhaps, to allow ourselves to be transformed in the very act of our seeing somebody not seeing. With this gesture, Sophocles also suggests that fiction is not opposed to reality but rather it is the ‘royal rode’ to it: it is participating in a kind of fiction, in a certain sort of ‘unreality’, which makes us capable of facing reality; our passage to the ‘real world’ is precisely through such appearances as the theatre. This is how, instead of concepts and theory (going back to Greek theoria, originally meaning ‘spectacle’),[8] we first get theatre (theatron, ‘a place of seeing’). And if we accept Károly Kerényi’s suggestion that Greek theoria and theorein (‘to look at’, ‘to gaze upon’) are etymologically related to Greek theos (‘God’),[9] then the theatre in Sophocles’s interpretation becomes a ‘place of seeing where one can – or cannot – look God in the face’. In Greek times the ritual of drama is part of a whole set of rituals: the amphitheatre is seen as the ‘navel of the earth’ and one can always find the omphalos there, a phallic-shaped stone, a memento (an not yet a symbol) of fertility (regeneration, spring, the promise of a new beginning, etc.). Drama is performed to purify the audience, to purge their souls almost in the clinical-medical sense (cf. the purging of the body). Today we see the theatre less as the ‘map of the world’ or as ‘the body of God’. But, properly understood, drama might still be able to transform “as if” into “I am” through seeing: fiction into being, fancy into existence by making us watch something, by offering us an in-sight. At the same time, we share the same (present) time but not the same physical space with the actors; we are and are not a part of the performance; we participate in the ritual but we are also ‘covered up’, in the nowadays often literal darkness of the auditorium; we may look at the things happening before us from a certain distance. In other words, drama is a genre where we might be a part of an action without being morally responsible directly: if we see a man trying to kill a woman in a restaurant, we are morally obliged to react somehow, call the waiter, the police, etc. If we, however watch this scene as part of Shakespeare’s Othello, then we may witness to a ‘domestic quarrel’ from the ‘comfort’ of the chair we paid for, and only the blockhead will jump on the stage to ‘rescue the white lady from the black scoundrel’.
If we, however, insist on the inherent dramaticality of the lecture, we arrive, at the same time, at one of the fundamental paradoxes of drama-theory. If drama is typically to be done, to happen, to be performed, then what is the relationship between the written script (giving a relative permanence to drama) and the drama on the stage? The text (in a book, in a certain edition) rather seems to be a pre-requisite of drama and it is not, it cannot be, identical with it. But if drama is rather the performance, then it does not exist in the proper sense of the word: it is gone in and with the moment: its typical being is in its being done. And that particular performance can never be reproduced: it was bound to that night, to that audience, to that mental and physical disposition of the actors; it vanishes in the very act of being produced.
The above paradox may give as two hints as to the nature of drama. The ‘time’ or ‘tense’ of drama seems to be the ‘present continuous’ rather than the ‘simple past’ (the latter so ‘natural’ as the ‘tense’ of narratives: novels, epic poetry, etc.). We might even say that the task of drama is precisely to transform the narrative, the simple past (or the past perfect), i.e. ‘finished history’ into the present continuous or, at least the present perfect. It should be noticed that the audience of Oedipus Rex knew the story by heart (as Shakespeare’s audience knew the story of Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet quite well, too); they did not go to the theatre to hear about ‘something new’. Rather, they wanted the myth to happen again, in their immediate present, they wished to participate in its ‘continuous present-ness’, they wanted to be present while it was re-presented in their present (continuous) ‘tense’. As Oedipus transforms a past piece of information (‘an old man was killed at the cross-roads’) into his present, turning knowledge into present understanding (so horrible that he will pluck his eyes out), so might our past become a part of our present in the theatre through our participating in the mythical-ritualistic re-enactment of what happened a long time before. Aristotle calls the moment of discovery anagnorisis, which, in Oedipus Rex, happens to coincide with the ‘reversal of fortune’ called peripeteia (cf. 2.3.3.). And it is the same change of the action into its opposite which transforms the active (voice) into the passive: the investigator turns into the object of investigation, the detective into the criminal, the teacher into the object of the lesson, the doer into the sufferer of the action, the agent into the patient.